Monday, 11 April 2016

Last year, among so many solemn centenaries of the First
World War, we remembered the ill-fated Gallipoli landings – part of a campaign,
intended to knock the Ottoman Turks out of the war, which cost the lives of so
many British and Empire servicemen. The soldier-poet Rupert Brooke never made
it to the landings. Bound for the Dardanelles, his troop ship was moored off
the Greek island of Skyros when he developed septicaemia from an insect bite
and died. He is buried on the island.

Rupert Brooke, “the handsomest young man in England” in the
opinion of WB Yeats, has become a poster-boy for the Lost Generation. His Cambridgeshire connections are well-known.
In 1909 he took lodgings in Grantchester in a former farmhouse called The
Orchard (doubling as a tea room even then) before moving next door to The Old
Vicarage a couple of years later. Early in 1912, frustrated in love and thwarted
in his bid for a Fellowship at King’s College, he suffered some form of nervous
breakdown. Recuperation abroad was recommended, and in May we find him in the
Café des Westens in Berlin, seated at a table by the window, reminiscing about
his skinny dips in Byron’s Pool:

Here I am, sweating, sick, and
hot,
And there the shadowed waters fresh
Lean up to embrace the naked flesh.

‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, from which these lines
come, has become one of his most famous poems, a deft combination of nostalgia,
luxuriant language and whimsy that stays just this side of sentimentality. Or
so I would argue. George Orwell was less impressed:

Rupert Brooke’s ‘Grantchester’,
the star poem of 1913, is nothing but an enormous gush of ‘country’ sentiment,
a sort of accumulated vomit from a stomach stuffed with place-names. Considered
as a poem ‘Grantchester’ is something worse than worthless but as an
illustration of what the thinking middle-class young of that period felt it is a valuable document. [Inside the Whale (1940).]

My impression is that Orwell was a sensitive reader of other
writers. As a thinker of the Left, he was naturally suspicious of writers who
didn’t share his politics, but he was also a big enough critic to appreciate
literary quality wherever it surfaced. If he didn’t find literary quality, he
still recognised that a writer could be read historically as a voice of his
time – which seems to be his approach to Brooke. The long, nuanced essay he
wrote on Kipling shows all these strategies in play. Conversely, a writer could
be on the same side of the political fence as Orwell but still be chastised for
irresponsibility. A few pages after his comment on Brooke in ‘Inside the
Whale’, he takes a pop at Auden. In Auden’s poem ‘Spain’ there’s a reference to
“necessary murder”. Orwell doubts that Auden had seen murder at first hand: “Mr
Auden’s brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who
is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled”. Yet, overall, Orwell
declares the poem to be “one of the few decent things that have been written
about the Spanish war”.

But I digress. Back to Brooke’s poem and his “accumulated
vomit from a stomach stuffed with place-names”. As a Cambridgeshire resident of
twenty years standing, I’m perhaps more attentive to these place names than Orwell
was (he was living in Hertfordshire in early 1940 when his essay appeared).

Brooke’s strategy is first to contrast England, where an “unofficial
rose” blooms under an “unregulated sun”, where feet may trespass on the grass,
with the Teutonic passion for order and regulation:

… and there
are
Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton
Where dasBetreten’s not verboten.

Then he narrows his focus to tell us why, of all
Cambridgeshire villages, he prefers “the lovely hamlet Grantchester”. By
contrast, he says,

… Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton’s full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you’d not believe
At Madingley on Christmas Eve.

In the margin of the manuscript Brooke wrote a list of
villages to be worked into the poem. Comberton was on the list but didn’t make the
final cut, being replaced by Trumpington. Denis Cheason, in his book The Cambridgeshire of Rupert Brooke,
suggests that Brooke may not even have visited all the places he mentions. In
any case, we locals are not to take offence:

To those of you who are residents
of the villages, do not be dismayed by Rupert Brooke’s comments. He was only
joking, or perhaps belittling neighbouring villages to highlight the
Grantchester which he loved.

No offence is taken, for the choice of names is very
obviously driven by the rhyme scheme: “Coton/verboten”, “rhymes/crimes”. But could there be any more behind it?
In her slim volume on the history of The Old Vicarage, Mary Archer concedes
that the place names “appear to have been chosen more for convenient scansion
than for any accurate local allusion”. However, she goes on to suggest
possible, if far-fetched, sources for the references to Barton and Madingley. For Barton she quotes the anonymous ballad
‘The Knocking Ghosts of Barton’, which is almost in the same octosyllabic metre
as Brooke’s poem:

Jiminy, criminy, what a lark,
You must not stir out after dark,
For if you do you’ll get a mark –
From this knocking ghost of Barton.

And of Madingley it is said that, in the late nineteenth
century, a Rector of High Church leanings promised the villagers a High Mass on
Christmas Eve. The squire forbade his tenants to attend but they went,
defiantly, and were turned out of their homes on Christmas Day. It’s the sort
of story that might have appealed to Brooke, had it come to his ears.

But neither Mary Archer nor Francis Burkitt and Christine
Jennings, in their book Rupert Brooke’s
Grantchester, have any suggestions for Coton. Another work, Coton Through the Ages (Kathleen Fowle and others, 2013), lists a
number of crimes and misdemeanours over the centuries – at least one case of
arson and a fair bit of sheep-rustling – but I don’t see anything likely to
tickle the fancy of the “handsomest young man in England”.

So do these place names go down in the annals of
literature merely as handy rhymes? As “accumulated vomit”? Or are we missing a
trick here?